I'm familiar with Santa Clara and San Jose. None of the other ones you listed. Santa Clara is a fine school and San Jose is a nice city the 10th largest in America, which is very surprising, but true. You are only an hour away from San Francisco as well so if you wanted see the city it would be easy to do.

Santa Clara has a pretty good reputation in the Bay Area, but the Bay Area is one of the most competitive places in America. Like Boston or New York. Santa Clara is probably the 4th / 5th most highly regarded school in the Bay Area and you will be competition with 9 law schools. Stanford, Berkeley, Hastings, USF, Santa Clara, Golden Gate and the CBA schools JFK, San Francisco, and then UC Davis and McGeorge are not far away.

San Jose is a nice town though it is perfect weather almost year round and Santa Clara is nice I have nothing bad to say about it. It is a Jesuit school and that is kind of present there, but that might be a result of the few people I know there being Jesuit to begin with so they probably bring up more than the normal students there.

Anyways, Santa Clara gets a thumbs up for me, but it is expensive and finding a job will be difficult, but it can be done.

Thanks for the info. The competitive legal market in Cali is really the only thing that is giving me pause in regards to Santa Clara. The more I look at their intellectual property/high tech law classes the more I want to go there. I suppose if there is one place to be and indebted and jobless lawyer it's beautiful San Jose right?

I was wondering if anyone had some first hand experience on these schools/areas as they are my current front runners. Of course I'm going to check them out/narrow them down before I choose to attend. Any info would be great thanks! As a side note, I deciding between concentrating in intellectual property and tax/business law. Thanks!

Santa Clara

Stetson

U of Oregon

Texas Tech

Ole Miss

Oklahoma

U of Kentucky

I went to undergrad at Umass Amherst and enjoy the college town atmosphere, but I am also comfortable in small/medium sized cities as well.

Starting out very few if any lawyers make 160k even from t14 schools. Go to law school if you want to be a lawyer, but not to make money. The reality is no degree guarantees you a fortune. Not an MBA, J.D, M.D, whatever it may be odds are you will never become a millionaire. There are plenty of t3/4 grads that have jobs as lawyers and there are plenty that don't. Same is true of people with Bachelor's, MBA's, M.D.s etc and a graduate from any school in any profession will likely say finding a job sucks. However, if you graduate from an ABA school pass the bar and work for as a lawyer for 20+ years then you will likely make a decent chunk of change and more importantly if you wanted to be a lawyer you would have enjoyed your career. There is no guaranteed way to get rich quick, but using common sense you can figure most T14 law school grad are going to make more than Tier 3/4 school grad. This is not always the case, but it is the majority of the time. I attend a tier 4 school and have really enjoyed it and made decent money so far. I also have a huge scholarship so I won't have much debt at graduation, which is awesome. A few of my friends that graduated from my school obtained jobs ranging from 50-100k. There are others who are still looking for a job and others who have not passed the bar yet. Some are really happy with their jobs thus far and others are not. It is really hard to say what will happen, but one thing is for sure if your main concern is money and money alone DO NOT go to law school. It is overpriced and the odds are you will never be a millionaire. However, if you are a person that wants to go into law because you want to be a Public Defender, D.A, or have some issue you want to resolve going to law school can be a great investment of time and money. This is because you cannot be a lawyer without going to law school. (I know there are some very complex ways to get around this, but they are so onerous it is not practical.)

So go to law school if you want to be a lawyer. If you want to make a fortune then I don't want to tell you. If someone knows of a guaranteed and easy way to make 160k let me know I'm sure everyone on this board including myself would like to know.